Scientists are concerned that a new “double mutant” version of the coronavirus has been found in California and that the strain might be more contagious.
According to Stanford Health Care spokesperson Lisa Kim, the Stanford Clinical Virology Lab detected and confirmed one case of the variant in the Bay Area. This “double mutant” version of the coronavirus first appeared in India.
Stanford is now looking at seven other possible cases.
The evolving strain is known as the “double mutant” since it has two mutations in the virus that helps it lock onto cells.
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, stated the “double mutant” strain had been found in 20% of cases sequenced from India’s hard-hit state of Maharashtra, where coronavirus cases have recently increased by more than 50% in the past week.
It’s unclear if this current COVID-19 variant is more infectious or immune to the coronavirus vaccine, but Chin-Hong claims it’s “logical” that it will be.
He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “It also makes sense that it will be more transmissible from a biological perspective as the two mutations act at the receptor-binding domain of the virus, but there have been no official transmission studies to date.”
According to Chin-Hong, the mutations in one of the strains are identical to those observed in coronavirus variants first discovered in Brazil and South Africa, and the other mutation is also found in a California variant.
The scientist said, “This Indian variant contains two mutations in the same virus for the first time, previously seen on separate variants.”
He explained, “Since we know that the domain affected is the part that the virus uses to enter the body and that the California variant is already potentially more resistant to some vaccine antibodies, it seems to reason that there is a chance that the Indian variant may do that too.”
Several other COVID-19 variants have already been identified in the United States, including the highly infectious B.1.1.7 UK variant, the B.1.351 South African variant, and the P.1 Brazilian variant.
